Blood is thicker - Dean Johns

Dean Johns

There's so little superficial resemblance between Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein Onn that it would be easy to forget or even fail to realise that they're first cousins.

But scratch the surface and it quickly becomes clear that they're so strikingly similar under the skin, and such deeply in-bred political as well as personal kin, as to prove to the point of parody the truth of the old proverb, "Blood is thicker than water".

Of course all Umno/BN leaders, or rather misleaders, are as thick as thieves, both literally in their misappropriation and outright robbery of whatever loot they can get their hands on, and figuratively in their sticking together for self-protection.

But Najib and Hishammuddin have an especially unholy alliance, in light of the former's notorious call for his "brothers and sisters" in Umno to defend Putrajaya, even if their bodies are broken and lives lost, and the latter's evident readiness to back-up this blood-thirsty call with his police, Rela and other forces.

And, for the purpose of disabusing Malaysians of any illusions that such threats aren't deadly serious, the cousins seized on the Bersih 3.0 rally as an opportunity for a demonstration of their united resolve.

First unleashing the police on unarmed and already-dispersing protesters, then justifying these unprovoked attacks by claiming that the Bersih cause for clean and fair elections had been "hijacked" by the opposition for the purpose of overthrowing the government by means of a "coup".

But as threateningly thick as thieves as this response to Bersih 3.0 once more proved them to be in their unified resolve to cling to power through dirty elections if possible, or force if necessary, it also once again revealed them both, collectively and individually, to be also as thick as bricks. Or, if you prefer, as two short planks.

And this thickness the cousins have in common, combined with the fact that they're both also congenital liars, endlessly causing them to make hopelessly confusing, conflicting, hypocritical and thus unbelievably self-destructive statements.

Hopelessly in love with the limelight
Najib is by far the more frequent offender in this regard, as he's not only the senior in rank as well as age and thus more sought-after for speeches and press conferences, but also, or so it appears to me, the one more hopelessly in love with the limelight and the sound of his own voice.

However, unfortunately for him, and by extension for his cousin and the rest of his Umno/BN sidekicks, Najib's every utterance is so thick with every audience turn-off I can think of, from blatant falsehoods to Freudian slips, that he appears hell-bent on verbal suicide.

A classic of this in the week just past was his address to the opening of the Malaysian Young Thinkers Convention, in which he urged the younger generation to "evaluate the achievements of the government from all aspects and not based on political perception and rhetoric".

The self-styled master of political perception and rhetoric, notorious for his squandering of fortunes in public money on international and even Israeli-owned public-relations consultants, then had the bare-faced gall to go on to proclaim that "we don't want leaders who are good actors".

"We don't want leaders who are good in oratory skills but are not truthful," he lied, "we don't want leaders attacking other leaders, but they themselves are not prepared to swear giving the excuse that it is a political conspiracy, everything is a political conspiracy and they are not prepared to defend themselves based on facts."

And in case that hadn't been sufficiently thick with hypocrisy for the Young Thinkers to be going on with, he then called on the younger generation to "acquire skills and take note that some of them were earning an income of RM3,000 by selling cup cakes."

I can't think what inspiration Najib imagined the youth would derive from this crummy evocation of Marie Antoinettte responding to reports that the poor had no bread, with the notorious, if possibly legendary retort, "let them eat cake".

Or, for that matter, how Malaysians at large would react to his arrogant boasting in a subsequent keynote speech at a "dialogue" for civil servants organised by the Razak School of Government that the recent repeal of the Internal Security Act had been solely due to the fact that the ISA "didn't help the BN-led government politically".

Too thick to realise the damage 

Thus, demolishing in one sentence all his own and his publicists' efforts to try and use the replacement of the ISA with not one but two new laws just as bad as evidence of his government's "moderate" and "democratic" credentials.

But he was too thick to realise the damage he was doing to his expensively-created image as a reformer, or rather "transformer", on behalf of the people, and went on to explain his cynical trickery with the remark, "if you put someone in under ISA it doesn't kill them politically, instead it enhances their political career".

This revelation of Umno/BN's typically shabby, sleazy and self-serving approach to its miserable misrule of Malaysia, though manipulation of unconstitutional laws like the ISA, neatly brings us to Hishammuddin's contribution for the week.

Because, what with being family and all, and working as hand-in-glove as they do, the two cousins have quite a double act going.

Najib, save when he slips out of character for broken bodies-and-lost-lives speeches and the above ISA revelations, likes to play good cop to Hishammuddin's bad cop.

And sure enough, having been relatively quiet for a while, bad-cop cousin Hishammuddin recently came out with a characteristically callous comment about a group of prisoners protesting against their maltreatment and continuing incarceration under the ISA, tweeting to some crony or supporter that it was the choice of the detainees to stage a hunger strike, just as it was his to have lamb chops.

In a food-loving nation like Malaysia, this is bound to provoke lots of debate. Which cousin do you think is thicker and makes you sicker? But personally I'm in no mood to dicker. Cousin cup-cake and cousin lamb-chop both equally make my blood boil, and Malaysian voters just as thick if they miss their next chance to give them the flick.